INTRODUCTION.

THE PERIODICAL ESSAY IN THE AGE OF

ANNE.

THE age of Anne is perhaps the best known of the great periods of English literary history. Its fashions and manmers are hardly less vivid to the student of literature than those of his own age, while the personalities of its great men stand out with singular distinctness. Its thoughts are even more familiar than its manners and characters; they have in great part entered into our experience, and live in the commonplace of our daily judgments or in the common sense of our familiar proverbs.

It is possible for us to understand the age of Queen Anne because it lies at the threshold of modern England: in other words, it begins to treat all questions of human concern in that rational and tolerant spirit which distinctively marks the modern thinker. With the Revolution of 1688 the forces that had been gradually gaining strength since the accomplishment of the Reformation suddenly became the dominant influences in English life and history. The position of science as the central interest in the new era had been assured since the time of Bacon, but with the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1662 came the popular recognition of the greatness of the new movement. Men of all ranks turned enthusiastically to the study of science. Dryden and Boyle, Denham and Cowley, were among the early members of the Royal Society, and even Charles II., given over to frivolity as he was, found means

to equip a chemical laboratory and time to work in it. The study of the natural sciences was, however, only one of the ways in which the new scientific impulse found expression. An even greater achievement was the application of scientific method to subjects hitherto lying in whole or in part without its pale. Thus from Dryden to Addison literary criticism, purely empirical in the hand even of a master like Ben Jonson, grows more and more scientific in charWith Locke the scientific, or experimental, method was applied more perfectly to metaphysics, to politics and to education. In a host of lesser writers appears the same effort to reduce to order the phenomena with which they were concerned.

The Revolution of 1688, with its appeal to principles and its demand for a rational scheme of government, stimulated and defined discussion by forcing it to an immediate application. J. R. Green calls this period the age of law, and, rightly interpreted, no single phrase can better describe the common character of its manifold activities. In the world of thought there was everywhere the attempt to discover law; in the world of practice, to enforce it. In politics, superficial as was the statesmanship of the day, there was for the first time a consistent appeal to reason, and an endeavor to represent in the government the various forces of the state. In morals and manners the same tendency was evident. Social law became the great guide to conduct; laws of taste were more and more applied to questions of etiquette and form. The underlying principles of the age were thus the same as those to which we appeal to-day. The special questions then discussed have long been outgrown or their nomenclature has been entirely changed; but in a common desire to treat all questions rationally and to refer them consistently to the test of experience, the thinkers of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth are at one.

Our knowledge of the age of Anne, made possible by the modernness of its thought, is directly due to the vivid portrayal of their time by its men of letters. They formed, indeed, an essential part of the society that they represented. Brought by temporary political conditions into places of power and influence, they met on equal terms lords and men of the world. Swift, after his youth of poverty and chagrin, dined with the ministers that he had helped, or was helping, to great place. Pope's familiar friends were Bolingbroke, Peterborough, and Bathurst. Addison and Steele were the companions of their political patrons. The social life of these men, which seems at first sight to narrow their work, in reality gave unity and force to the cause for which they stood. They were bent, as truly as their more purely political friends, on a reorganization of society, though for both the word included no more than the upper and upper-middle classes. Yet, limited as was their idea of society when compared with ours, it was far broader than any previous conception, and by its very restrictions allowed for a more perfect unification of purpose and effort than has been possible in after times. To enlarge the world of the bigot, to deepen the world of the trifler, by bringing home to both what to the thinker made life worth living, was the aim of the best men of the age in their best endeavors. In such an effort they were singularly happy in holding a position that enabled. them to preach in the language of the men of the world.

The greatness of literature in the early eighteenth century, though largely due to temporary political conditions, was made possible by the growth of a reading public that towards the end of the seventeenth century began to be a powerful factor in the development of literature proper. In the age of Elizabeth the great means of reaching the people had been the stage, though sermons and pamphlets were even then widely read. Puritan England had, how

ever, been too deeply absorbed in political and religious questions to care for any literature besides the theological and political discussions in which it abounded. After the return of Charles II. the mass of the nation seems to have gone on its way, reading sermons and pamphlets, if reading at all, while literature and the stage found their audience in the court and in the small fraction of the wealthy London society that followed its fashion. The literature written to so small and select a circle has naturally a certain society tone; its appeals to ladies and gentlemen, its urbanity and freedom from pedantry, prove how really the writers of the day were appropriating the courtly manners of speech and thought. Had Charles been as generous to letters as he was appreciative of them, and had constitutional questions remained in the background during his reign, it is possible that England might have developed a court literature as distinctive, if neither so artistic nor so lofty, as that of France. Actually, however, events took a different course. The threatening of Protestant interests and constitutional government, whether real or supposed, called the Puritan middle class from its isolation and forced even Charles and James to recognize its political power. It was to reach this already influential public that Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel was written in 1681. The unparalleled success of the satire not only proved the strength of this public and showed its interest in practical questions of religion and government; it marked the passage of literature from the service of the court to the service of the government and of the people, and so connects its future with that of the larger world of readers which was then beginning to turn to letters for amusement and information. For politics was but one, though at the time undoubtedly the first, among the interests of English middle-class readers. With their growth in wealth and power and their reaction

against the religious enthusiasm of the generation before, there had come a keen scientific interest in the world around them, a moral fervor for right living and a desire for things comely and of good report in daily life. With such a public sentiment, the development of literature was assured: the task of writers was only to get into touch with the many waiting and eager for their teaching. The bringing together of writers and the reading public was, as we have seen in the case of Dryden, precipitated by the political conditions of the years about the Revolution. In the burst of loyalty that welcomed Charles II. to the throne reason was forgotten, and for a time the king's will was supreme. But the opposition aroused by his frivolity and misgovernment forced Charles to support his cause by an appeal to men of letters. Beyond an occasional and grudging reward for the greatest service, his appreciation never went. Dryden, for supporting, perhaps saving, the government in a great crisis, was given, so far as we can tell by documentary evidence, an unlucrative post in the customs. But Cowley, who had been a devoted follower of the royal fortunes, was wholly neglected, and Butler, whose Hudibras had given a telling blow to the Puritans, died in misery and want. Under the successor of Charles men of letters fared even worse; for James was utterly lacking in literary-appreciation, and substituted for Charles's superficial generosity of manner a grudging acknowledgment as well as a grudging payment of his debts to literature. Indeed, as far as he could, he repressed the activities and discouraged the development of the writers of his reign.

With the Revolution of 1688 came an almost immediate change in the position of men of letters: their power, gained in spite of the policy of the Stuart kings, became suddenly necessary to the new government. The establishment of a constitutional monarchy, with a king at its